laceblade

• What are you currently reading?
Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
There was obviously lots of Kennedy reminisces last week with the 50-year anniversary of JFK's assassination.
I bought this for $2 at the Memorial Library sale a couple months ago, during the Wisconsin Book Festival.
I like it quite a bit, just finished the chapter about the investigation committee into unions/etc., focusing on Jimmy Hoffa.
Overall, it's very sanitized, pretty obvious Schlesinger was a close family friend, etc.
For example, the mention of Rosemary going to live with nuns in Wisconsin is just a simple, "She got worse," with no mention of the attempted-and-botched lobotomy.
I empathize for RFK, who most people seemed to take as crabby & irritable if they didn't know him very well.

Very! Very! Sweet, volume 4. Only a chapter in, but I finally have this volume, which means I'll get from here to volume 8/the end in short order.

Hild by Nicola Griffith - It took about 70 pages for me to fall into this book. So far, I don't love it quite so much as some of her other stuff, but I'm sure she'll set me straight before the end.
Griffith is one of my favorite authors, & she and her wife are doing in a reading in my city next Tuesday at my favorite bookstore, so I'm pretty excited.


• What did you recently finish reading?
X-Men: Curse of the Mutants - This is essentially X-Men versus vampires. Jubilee becoming a vampire was interesting, but overall I disliked this.

X-Men: With Great Power - Following the previous volume, this was also written by Victor Gischler. I'm glad to get a little familiar with him, as he's going to be taking over the writing for Angel & Faith when Buffy season 10 starts up.
This included some more recognizable characters (Spider-Man), and the team is dealing with PI. I liked the art much more in this volume than Curse of the Mutants, in part because it was much less objectifying of women. While I found Xavier's manpain flashback sentiment in the last issue annoying, I appreciated him communicating to Jubilee that she'll be able to find a way to live with her new condition.
My goal in reading these was to get the backlog for the current series headed by Brian Wood. Given the revelation a couple weeks ago, I haven't decided yet whether I'll be continuing. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to get through the previous arc via the library.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 1-17 or so, + micro 1-8 + Infestation 1 & 2, + Eastman's 2012 annual: I've been behind on this for...years?! But I keep buying the single issues, resulting in general guilt :/
Luckily, I really enjoyed these (yes, some were rereads). I loved TMNT as a kid. I'm pretty sure my parents still have my turtles/Casey Jones/Bebop & Rock Steady action figures. As a child, one of my ambitions (in addition to being Batman) was to be a TMNT myself.
Anyway, these are dark-ish. Mutant turtles fight ninjas! April is a research intern! I roll my eyes a little at the Splinter/turtles/Shredder were Japanese men reincarnated, but overall these are pretty fun to read. I still have more to catch up on.
I found Infestation 1 & 2 subpar except for the art, & kind of loathed the art in Eastman's annual.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America - The title is sort of self-explanatory, but this book has a white investigative journalist telling the story of Jackie Bates, a black woman living in Chicago who provides care for her 3 children, husband who's on kidney dialysis & abuses drugs, ailing deadbeat father, and her diabetic grandma who's in crisis. The book was published in 1993, although it's obviously still relevant today. Complex bureaucracy consistnetly fails the Bates family. I particularly liked the chapter focusing on the Orthodox Jewish doctor who refused to discuss do-not-resuscitate orders with the family because he didn't agree with it himself. While distant with the Bates, Abraham follows him to his practice where he treats other Jews, and his demeanor is totally different.
But the Bates family never finds a practitioner who's on their level.
The book also spends a chapter talking about black people's fear of research, and also how consent given by poor people is often less informed than consent given by middle class whites - with whom many educated doctors can better related. Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, there's a voyeuristic feel here - a white woman telling a black family's story. I wonder what Jackie's kids will feel when they grow up and read this book, intimately discussing their family's mental health, drug problems, etc. Still, it was put out by an academic publisher and is less of a fame thing than Skloot's book.
The book is highly relevant to my job, glad to have read it.

The Hemingses of Monticello - I waited until only days before this was due back at the library, so of course I didn't finish it (have since checked it out again so I'll be able to continue!). I think this is a pretty well-known book, but Gordon-Reed's goal is basically to tell the story of the Hemings family - a family of slaves living in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Sally Hemings had numerous children with Thomas Jefferson. I only made it through the first 9 chapters, so 14-year-old Sally and one of Jefferson's daughters had just joined him in Paris, where he's hanging out, still upset over his wife's death.
It'd be easy to focus on Jefferson, and while I've always found him an interesting person, I'm really appreciative that Gordon-Reed refuses to let this story belong to anyone but the Hemingses.
I'm looking forward to reading more of this.

Adaptation - I think I like this the most out of the books I've read by Malinda Lo so far. We read this for beer_marmalade. Very fast-paced, love the characters. Complicated, government conspiracies, a coming out story, lots of good stuff.

Dengeki Daisy, vol. 1 - Teru's brother was a hacker before he died. On his death bed, he gave a phone to her so that she could communicate with his friend DAISY - another hacker like himself who will always listen to Teru's problems now that she's alone, & will help her out of binds.
The real-life Daisy is a 24-year-old janitor at her school, although they both pretend they don't know he's Daisy.
When Teru breaks a school window, she has to "work off" her debt.
I grow tired of shoujo manga plots where the heroines become indentured servants to men.
It seems weird at first for a girl to be soe dependent on a guy she's never met but still tells all her problems to, & yet I did the same thing in middle/high school with a guy I'd met in an internet chat room, so this story has enough for me to continue for now.

Wild Com - a volume of short stories by Yumi Tamura, the manga-ka behind my beloved Basara.
I really loved the first story, in which people with elemental powers try to save others around them. The theme is "try your best no matter what," which happens a lot in manga but never fails to be incredibly moving to me!
The other stories were strange & weird but more forgettable.

Air: Letters from Lost Countries by G. Willow Wilson. Since she's going to be writing Ms. Marvel when it starts coming out in 2014, I wanted to be a little more familiar with Wilson's work. So far I've only previously read the stand-alone "Mystic" comic, meant for kids, which I didn't really like.
Air is about a flight attendant who's afraid of falling. Her love interest is an inpersonation-chameleon, and either a terrorist himself, or running from terrorists - or both.
There's a lot going on here, & I'll be reading more.

• What are you currently reading?
Basara manga! (see below)

• What did you recently finish reading?
The Cuckoo's Calling - overall verdict is UGGHHHHHH THIS IS SO GOOD. I couldn't put it down - I was as engrossed with this book as I was with Harry Potter.
The protagonist, Strike, copes with residual pain from having his leg amputated in the military. He uses a prosthesis, but his stump can get sore & flare up when he walks too much, as happens when he's working a lot, interviewing witnesses, scoping out scenes, etc.
The narrative starts from his temporary assistant Robin's point of view, but the story is Strike's. Throughout the book, we see glimpses of Robin's thoughts, but usually just when they start to get interesting, we shift back to Strike.
Rowling's POV characters can be incredibly harsh in the way they observe other people, which at times can be a little uncomfortable. Rowling never ignores the effects of race & class on people, but her POV characters are white. So you'll have things that pop up, like describing an Asian background character as "Oriental."
It's also a mystery/crime novel, so typical warnings for like, violence/murders/things like that.
I'll be buying this when it comes out in paperback, best thing I've read in the last little while.
I prefer this to The Casual Vacancy, which was well-written but was an almost distasteful finger-shaking at society given how...overwrought it was?!

Immediately after finishing TCC, I realized that volume 21 of Basara was due back at the library on 7/22, & I'd only read through volume 9. THUS, BASARA BINGE.
Basara, volumes 10-17 - lots of development in volume 10, & I really loved it. ( Spoilers. )

In volume 13, Sarasa meets people resisting Suo City's latest tryant.
Sarasa reflects that Rinko doesn't "look like" a rebel leader because she's so feminine - she prints an underground newspaper and then makes her living by sewing clothing. It's hard for Sarasa to reconcile femininity with rebellion - in her own life, she has to adopt a masculine identity to be a leader (or so she thinks - her own friends/forces welcomed her when she revealed her true gender/identity).
I wonder whether there will be more exploration of Sarasa's relationship with gender before the end? I hope so.
Anyway, Rinko's boyfriend Hozumi is disgusted with volume, and shows a different way to resist - painting green swirls coming out from Rinko's pyre after she's been captured & is being publicly shamed/tortured. Hozumi says, "If I try to make a speech now, it can only sound naive. ...Why do they think killing is the only way to make change? Can't the world be made better through creation instead?"
LOTS OF FEELINGS.

Similarly, lots of feelings in volume 15, when Shuri & Sarasa have some further revelations. I'm still racing through to make it through volume 21 before the library closes tomorrow!

• What do you think you’ll read next?
MOAR BASARA so that I can return a pile of stuff to the library tomorrow. After that, idk. I still have lots of stuff checked out from the library, so probably more of that :D

• What are you currently reading?
Nothing at this given moment. Was reading some Wherever You Go, There You Are by John Kabat-Zinn last night.
At one point I was encouraged to practice meditation to deal with chronic pain & other issues.
I'm still trying to suss out some routines between this & traditional Catholic prayer.
I have a hard time reading more than a few pages of this book at a time without rolling my eyes, although it doesn't usually make me angry like Pema Chodron did. My personality feels very much not pre-disposed to meditation, but I keep trying to find some techniques anyway, I guess.

• What did you recently finish reading?
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. Just fantastic. I was expecting this to end a little more unfinished, as I know there was a 3rd book planned before she died, but it's still very satisfying.
I expect to reread this & Parable of the Sower many times.

Special A, vols. 1-2 - Ugh. Yet another series where a girl has a male rival in school, who will inevitably end up being her love interest. There's nothing special going on here, and my library doesn't have volume 3 (though it has later volumes!). Drop.

Basara, volume 1 - This came up in a discussion about a possible post-apocalyptic/dystopian anime/manga panel at WisCon 38. meganbmoore also mentioned this on Twitter and I was like, "UGH but the art is so 1990s and awful with ridiculous jaw lines and etc."
VOLUME ONE IS SO GOOD OMFGGGGGG.
In a post-apocalyptic Japan where everything's basically a desert, a pair of twins is born. Their tribe's prophet intones, "This is a child of destiny!" and Sarasa grows up believing the child of destiny is her brother Tatara - her tribe thinks so, too!
They suffer under a despotic king, waiting for the day that Tatara will lead a revolution to overthrow their corrupt society.
Then, Tatara's head gets chopped off.
So Sarasa cuts her hair, binds her chest, and becomes Tatara for her tribe.
UGH SO GOOD, SO EXCITED TO READ MORE.

• What do you think you’ll read next?
Bringing on a mini-vacation with me: Under the Banner of Heaven, The Summer Prince, a feminist Catholic book, Basara manga, & Shugo Chara! manga.

RANDOM: j00j & I were talking about how there's lots of depictions of comfort food in fantasy novels, but had trouble coming up with sci-fi examples. j00j made a post soliciting examples, which is here.
"[H]ow much science fiction is there with appealing food descriptions? It's not all Gagh and replicators and food pills/amyloid/protein gruel, right?"